Abstract

The presentation deals with aspects of law and social morality reflected in prominent children’s weeklies that were meaningful agents of socialization in Israel’s first decade. Those years, embracing the transition from Yishuv (the organized Jewish community in the Land of Israel) to political sovereignty, were significant and drew the contours of Israeli society. It was a meaningful era in terms of a switch from a society seemingly accustomed to the practice of illegality to a society committed to the idea of the rule of law. Throughout this decade, the children’s press played an important role in shaping the values of the young generation.

A close reading of the children’s journals, which were differentiated by sectorial and even political leanings, reveals the overt and covert ways in which the regularization of laws, norms, and moral values in daily life in the new State of Israel took place and were assimilated in the writing, on a regular basis and on selected topics, and illuminates the nature of the journals’ effort to shape their readers’ attitude toward the law generally and to the rule of law in formative Israel particularly.

See here about Dr. Talia Diskin